Quote:
Kevin Leavitt wrote:
I am not sure what came first the chicken or the egg.
However I think simply that detachment or coolness under fire are by products. You train hard and gain skill, competence, and experience in what u are doing, it allows you to see more clearly what is going on. Because you understand this better you can make decisions better more devoid of emotion, and much will become intutuive, without thought.
It frees up the mind to make more important decisions with more input that provides us a better chance of making a better informed decision.
If I am going to debate I study debate. If I am going to enter pie eating contest, I am going to study those things that attribute to me to eat more pies. If I am going to fight, I study fighting, and approximate the conditions under which I am going to potentially face.
The point is, to reach the state of detachment I want to achieve in any situation requires that I gain experience in those conditions or I will have very little to fall back on when reality is met.
Budo will allow me to experience some important things that will help us in life if we are true to it, and honestly look at what it is that it will actually do for us. The catch 22 is that we form associations and attachments, and look for meaning when in fact, there is nothing really there many times. IMO there are some very simple and straight forward things that budo can teach us, but because we are human, we like to make things difficult and complex. It also gives us an excuse to not hold ourselves accountable when we fail to learn those simple lessons or don't want to pit in the hard work. For a lot of folks, it is also about the entertainment value.
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Kevin:
You pointed out something very important. The detachment and coolness under extreme stress situations are products of proper training. That type of training is typically missing from most martial arts training paradigms. I have seen too many martial artists get the piss knocked out of them because they simply fell apart during extreme stress incidents. Training in the military and some realistic self-defense training schools work on "inoculating" the person so that the person can effectively function under extreme stress circumstances.
Non-competitive training paradigms are not designed to address that issue. I separate these components in my school and make it entirely optional for people to do some occasional work on learning how to deal with high stress situations. Some things, like addressing breathing patterns are built into what I teach as part of the regular curriculum.
It might be instructive and informative for some for you to describe some the means by which the military addresses this issue in their training paradigms.
Be Well,
marc abrams